For almost a year I’ve been going weekly to The Western Mass Pinball Club to play a variety of classic and new pinball machines. I’ve been a big fan of pinball for as long as I can remember and painting them has been on my mind for quite a while. These are the first two pinball paintings.
“Life Savings” 16”x12” acrylic on canvas
“Life Savings” 16”x12” acrylic on canvas. I’ve wanted to paint one of the cash register banks for a while. Last month I went to a local indoor flea market and came across a brand new black cash register bank. I got excited for a minute, but I really wanted one with some wear and tear from being played with on it, or what my friend @kevmann42 has dubbed “playtina”. I also wanted something colorful.
Further into the store, in a stall I don’t alway check there was this blue cash register. Score! I grabbed it and continued shopping and thinking of how to use the cash register in a painting. It dawned on me that it was a piggy bank and maybe I could do something with piggy banks.
At that moment, I turned to leave a section and literally bumped into a shelf full of piggy banks. It felt like fate. The only problem was none of them really fit the aesthetic. There was on large white ceramic pig, decorated with painted flowers but it wasn’t right.
I remembered my translucent piggy bank at home, and thought that it would be perfect to find a small blue opaque pig about the same size. Again, I turned to leave the section and this time I was staring directly at the small pale blue ceramic piggy bank at the top of the painting.
Sometimes you choose the painting and other times the painting chooses you.
There was nothing better than opening a full toy box. Except maybe painting one. I love everything thing in this painting. Paintings like this are difficult to step away from because there’s always tiny areas that I could keep working on. At a certain point those changes become almost imperceptible. That’s usually when I know it’s time to move on.
Toy Chest 2 Prints
Signed 12”x16 prints of Toy Chest 2 are now in the shop for $35. They are printed on 100% cotton, acid free, archival hot press paper.
For a limited time you can order Toy Chest and and Toy Chest 2 prints together for
Toy Chest 2 – signed print on 12×16 archival 100% cotton hot press paper
Yesterday I spent the day at The New England Toy & Record Show at the Kittery Lyons Club in Maine. I was invited to share space with Kevin Mann aka Captain Caveman of Kaveman Toys. It was my first time attending an event like this as a vendor instead of as a collector, and it was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.
When I started painting again, I thought that if I painted the things I cared about, then the people who liked my work would be the ones who also liked the same things. I know it sounds obvious, but many artists including myself, have struggled with painting for themselves vs painting what they think will sell or please others even if it’s not something the artist particularly cares about.
My suspicions couldn’t have been more spot on. First with my growing followers on Instagram, then into the real world with people like Kevin, a toy seller and overall one of the nicest, most generous people I’ve met, and everyone I encountered yesterday. Fans of the same action figures and toys as me came to look at and buy my paintings and prints. We talked about the art, the toys, and their experiences growing up with them or hunting them down now. A special shout out to Mike who drove up from MA to ME just to say hi and pick up some prints in person. Hearing that he came up to see me, was moving beyond words.
I’m incredibly grateful to be able to make the art that I do, and even more grateful to share it with the people who appreciate it the same way I do. I can’t wait until I do another show, but in the mean time it’s time to get back to painting.
“Tonics, Potions & Elixirs” 12”x16” acrylic on canvas. I’ve always loved depictions of mad scientist labs, witches’ & wizards’ shelves, and sideshow displays… I’ve been collecting these bottles and filling them with things since October. It was finally time to paint them. Glass, liquids, reflections, and shadows are all fun to look at and to paint.
A LOT has happened. Shows, awards, and tons of paintings. Currently I have some paintings hanging at The Quarters in Hadley, MA as of June 5, 2021. They’ll be there for a while. All of the details about the last year and half can be found by scrolling through my Instagram posts or my Facebook posts, because there’s way too much to put into this post.
The Quarters in Hadley, MA is currently hosting a selection of my paintings in their super cool retro arcade / restaurant!!! I can’t think of a more appropriate place for these painting lol to hang. I spent many hours in arcades playing these very games during the summer, and the place is full of vintage toys and games.
If you’re in the area, you HAVE to check this place out, and pick up a print while you’re there!
The nostalgia and sense of fun is clear in Chris Bordenca’s vibrantly-colored paintings of toys, action figures, and other treasured memorabilia from the 70’s and 80’s. His subjects are iconic and familiar: Star Wars characters, Batman villains, Rubik’s Cubes, video games, sea monkeys, and more, that immediately evoke that pre-internet era, especially for 80’s kids. Chris says: Almost nothing gets forgotten anymore. The past exists in the collective memory of the internet, and we can reach in and physically bring those memories into our present. These paintings are tangible and joyful reminders of the most recent pre-internet past, even if you weren’t an 80’s kid.
10% of sales from this exhibit will be donated to the The Belchertown Education Foundation. BEF is an independent, volunteer, non-profit organization committed to enriching the educational opportunities of students in Belchertown public schools.
About Chris Bordenca: Chris’ work focuses on personal connections to objects and places from his youth in the seventies and eighties, including paintings of action figures, toys, and video games from that era. After a ten-year hiatus he returned to painting in 2018. Since then, he has shown his work around the valley in group shows, and a show in Australia to benefit victims of the wildfires. His painting “Starless Sea With Keys” won first place for acrylic painting at the 2020 Northeast Fine Arts Exposition. Chris has a BFA from UMass Amherst and lives with his family in Belchertown. bordenca.com
PLEASE NOTE: walk-ins are welcome for the gallery. Masks required. Currently we are allowing four customers in the shop at one time.
Q&A with Chris
How has your style changed over the years? I started painting album covers and comic book art on people’s leather jackets in and after high school. In my 20’s I began painting murals in homes and businesses of whatever was asked, but my personal work turned to abstract figurative paintings. I then moved to large non-representational paintings, while still painting murals commercially. Eventually painting other people’s ideas in the murals became tedious, and I became turned off from painting all together. Ten years later, I decided to approach painting the same way that I approached art when I was young. I would paint whatever I wanted. Anything that made me happy. That is what I do now.
When did you know you wanted to be an artist? 1982. When I was seven years old I had a coloring book based on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. One of the images inside included a relatively realist drawing of the dog from the movie. I copied the drawing of the dog, and it was the very first time I felt what it was like to really see the thing I was looking at. I suddenly understood how to look at something and draw an accurate representation of it. It felt like real magic, and I was hooked.
What inspires you? I love tapping into the toys and pop culture from the 70’s and 80’s. I also love old books, abandoned buildings, and beat up vehicles. I like the idea of things managing to survive through time to the present and capturing their magic before they disappear.
What is your creative process like? How do you work? In the studio I basically play with toys for hours until I find the right feeling. I take a ton of photos with different lighting and arrangements.
What is your favorite piece that you’ve created? My current favorites are Toy Chest, Space Invader, and Mission: Unknown
Any advice to young or emerging artists? Make art for yourself, not what other people think you should make, or what you think other people will like.
Images above cropped from: Space Invader, acrylic on canvas, 20×16″ Smile, acrylic on canvas, 20×16″ Hitchhiker, acrylic on canvas, 20×20″
Prints! A small batch of “The Starless Sea & Keys” giclee prints are now available in my shop. Over the next couple of weeks I will be adding small batches of various prints, and an original or two as well. I spend whatever free time I can painting, so I don’t get to the prints often. If you or someone you know is interested, grab ‘em while they’re available!.
“The Starless Sea & Keys”. 14”x11” acrylic on canvas. Winner 1st Place Acrylic – Northeast Fine Arts Show 2020. These keys belonged to my great grandfather. The last few things I’ve read have coincidentally featured keys prominently. First was the The Locke & Key series by Joe Hill that I’ve been told to read by a lot of friends who knew I’d enjoy it. Halfway through that series I learned that Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus, had a new book titled The Starless Sea. Inside the cover are illustrations of all these different keys. In the beginning of the story there is even a reference to Locke & Key. These fantastic stories linked by keys found their way to me at the same time and I remembered that years ago my father gave my son a set of old keys. It wasn’t until I started photographing the keys on the books that I could read the brass name tag. T. J. Kelly or Thomas John Kelly, my great grandfather, after whom my father was named.
I have a small collection of various octopus figurines made of plastic, glass, and rubber. A few of them have crept into the background of some of my paintings. The realistic one can be seen behind King Kong and its tentacles are curling into view beside the Creature from the Black Lagoon. There’s something so alien about the shape, movement, texture, and intelligence of octopuses (or octopi) that I’m totally fascinated by them.
Skull Harbor 14”x16” acrylic on canvas
Last month my family and I were in Plymouth, MA, where I’ve gone every summer my whole life. We went to one of the many kitschy gift shops on the waterfront and I found a basket full of these weird red rubber octopuses. They were straight out of the 80’s and had to have been sitting there in that store for the last 30 years untouched, no kid would have wanted one of these oddly designed creatures.
With that purchase I knew it was going to make it into the next painting along with the rest of the collection. As I started getting the octopuses together, I found a couple of rubber sharks, and remembered the countless times I had my parents buy me the same rubber shark toy souvenir year after year. It also reminded me of a restaurant we used go to in Plymouth called Souza’s Seafood.
Souza’s was the quintessential old school seaside restaurant. The ceiling was covered in a huge fishing net full of plastic lobsters, crabs, starfish, fish, shells, buoys, etc. it even had the huge tank full of lobsters at the entrance from which you could choose your dinner. As a kid it was magical. It was a place SpongeBob would have worked.
When I was thinking of a way to set up this array of fake sea creatures I was originally thinking I’d set them up in the sand at the beach but it didn’t feel right. There’s something inherently creepy about the ocean beneath the piers, docks, and jetties of the waterfront. You know there’s a ton of life down there on the bottom, the water is murky, at low tide you can see the bottom, and at high you know just how far over your head the water would be.
I was about to clean my fish tank when it dawned on me that it had just the right murkiness to hit that sweet spot for me. It’s a combination of creepy and silly. Like the fish tank in Pee-Wee’s playhouse plus the tale of Davy Jones’ locker.
So here it is. It was more challenging than I expected, but overall I’m satisfied. I hope you like it.
Notes: My 9 year old son Will came up with the perfect title. And the lobster is a fridge magnet souvenir that I stuck to the side of the tank. I’ve had that aquarium skull since I was fifteen, but didn’t get a fish tank until I was 30.
